A frequent complaint of military historians is that the general public’s
notion of the First World War is little more than a “myth”, largely fuelled
by the enduring popularity of the War Poets. They argue that the widespread
belief that the war was futile, uniquely wasteful of human life and
conducted by arrogant and incompetent generals persists, in the face of the
facts, because people read Wilfred Owen, Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon
rather than scholarly works of military history. Unlike the ordinary rankers
who made up the greater part of the British Army and endured the trenches
with stoicism and good humour, the War Poets are dismissed as a “small but
unrepresentative group of junior officers” who stand accused of being
oversensitive, of being too much concerned with their own finer feelings,
even of “whingeing”. Most of them, we are reminded, joined up voluntarily
and, at the beginning of their service, believed in the war and supported
its aims; most, indeed, remained, militarily speaking, “good officers”. The
principal reason they were appalled by the conditions they found in the
trenches is that they came from comfortable, middle-class homes, and so the
Western Front, as one eminent historian put it, “was their first
introduction to the real world of struggle, discomfort, and hardship as most
of mankind experienced it”.
Such arguments overlook a man whom some people would consider the greatest of
the War Poets: Isaac Rosenberg. Far from coming from a comfortable
background and enlisting because he believed in the cause, Rosenberg was the
son of a Jewish pedlar recently arrived from Lithuania, was raised largely
in the slums of London’s East End, and joined up against his principles and
beliefs because he needed the soldier’s pay to support his mother. He served
in the ranks, where he felt bullied and discriminated against, loathed
almost every moment of his service, refused a lance corporal’s stripe, and
was killed at the age of twenty-seven on April 1, 1918. As Jean Moorcroft
Wilson points out in her capacious new biography, Isaac Rosenberg: The
making of a Great War poet, while most of the War Poets wrote empathetically
as officers about the men under their command, Rosenberg was himself one of
those men: “when he recalls \[in “Dead Man’s Dump”\] how ‘a man’s brains
spattered on / A stretcher-bearer’s face’, he was the stretcher-bearer. And
when, in the same poem, he records how ‘the wheels lurched over sprawled
dead’, he was the driver of the limber-carriage referred to, and not the
officer ordering or witnessing the incident”.
Wilson’s book is about much more than “the making of a Great War poet”, and
indeed Rosenberg himself was for most of his short life trying to decide
whether poetry or painting was his true vocation. His artistic promise was
recognized early by the headmaster of his otherwise unremarkable board
school in Stepney, who arranged for the boy to spend one day a week at the
nearby Arts and Crafts School. When Rosenberg was obliged to leave school at
fourteen, he took an uncongenial job with a Fleet Street engraver, from
which he was dismissed for “slackness”. He had meanwhile started writing
poetry and attending evening classes in painting at Birkbeck College. Always
something of a loner, he nevertheless became part of a loose group of young
Jewish painters and writers – David Bomberg, Mark Gertler, Joseph Leftwich,
Stephen Winsten, John Rodker – who congregated at the Whitechapel Library
and Art Gallery and walked the East End streets at night discussing art and
literature. Wilson suggests that Rosenberg’s whole life was marked by
instances of both very good and very bad luck, and it was the former that
led him to meet three philanthropic Jewish women who paid for him to go to
the Slade School of Art.
Rosenberg may have been a friend and fellow student of the far more flamboyant
and confident Bomberg and Gertler, but he didn’t altogether fit in at the
Slade, which another student, Paul Nash, likened to “a typical English
Public School seen in a nightmare”. He was small, frail and distinctly
odd-looking, with “bad adenoids and shocking teeth”; he was shy with women,
and his “appalling Cockney accent” rendered his speech “barely intelligible”
to some of his more sheltered contemporaries. As his friend the painter John
Amshewitz observed, Rosenberg was also “a strange mixture of extreme modesty
and assertiveness – factors which made him difficult and led to the
estrangement of many of his best friends and to disaster as a student”. This
mixture caused friction with his benefactors too: he was happy to accept
patronage but was very sensitive to being patronized. Wilson comments on
Rosenberg’s self-absorption, but it was this (as well as the cheapness of
the model) that led to him painting so many self-portraits, and these are
among his finest achievements.
All the while, Rosenberg was writing poetry, and it is perhaps significant, as
Wilson notes, that Bomberg’s 1913 portrait of him was titled “Head of a
Poet” rather than “Head of a Painter”. It was, however, as a painter that in
June 1914 he set off for South Africa (chosen for the sake of his weak lungs
and because a sister lived there), hoping to make a living as a portraitist.
“I hardly know anybody whom I would regret leaving”, he wrote before his
departure; “but whether it is that my nature distrusts people, or is
intolerant, or whether my pride or my backwardness cools people, I have
always been alone.” Alone Rosenberg may have felt, but he now had some
powerful allies, chief among them Edward Marsh, to whom he had been
introduced by Gertler at the Café Royal. Marsh bought his paintings and
encouraged his writing, and Wilson defends the editor of Georgian Poetry
against some commentators who feel that a man of his conservative tastes was
ill-suited to guide Rosenberg’s literary talent. While it is true that Marsh
often found Rosenberg’s compressed, highly original but often opaque poetry
baffling, Wilson is right to say that the young poet benefited from Marsh’s
insistence on the importance of craftsmanship, and she provides two versions
of “Midsummer Frost” to prove her point.
Rosenberg was in South Africa when war broke out, but it was not merely
geographical distance that caused him to react rather differently to the
news from Marsh’s most famous protégé, Rupert Brooke. “Are we going to have
Tennyson’s ‘Battle in the air’, and the nations deluging the nations with
blood from the air?”, he asked Marsh rhetorically on August 8. What we got,
of course, were Brooke’s “1914” sonnets, which were quite as resolute for
battle as anything by Tennyson. Rosenberg’s “On Receiving News of the War:
Cape Town” is in its way as declamatory as Brooke, but it is also
apocalyptic. Furthermore, it doesn’t thank God for war as an opportunity “to
turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping”, but ends with a plea that God
should “Give back this universe / Its pristine bloom”. Preferably, one
deduces, before Rosenberg gets involved: these lines echo the continuation
of the letter just quoted: “Now is the time to go on an exploring expedition
to the North Pole; to come back and find settled order again”. His family,
perhaps understandably, insisted that Rosenberg return from a happy time in
South Africa in order to serve his country. Wilson, who has discovered much
fresh evidence about Rosenberg’s time in Cape Town, produces an alternative
account of this period, drawing on the reminiscences of rather more
objective witnesses. Rosenberg’s prickly character caused difficulties there
as elsewhere, and the ending of what seems to have been an affair with
Margueretha Van Hulsteyn (who later found fame on the London stage as Marda
Vanne – and denied any close involvement with him) possibly encouraged
Rosenberg to return to England in February 1915. He also missed the cultured
life he had grown used to in London, finding South Africa dismally
philistine: “Think of me, a creature of the most exquisite civilization,
planted in this barbarous land”, he invited Marsh. It was not, however, a
civilization Rosenberg was rushing back to defend with a bayonet.
Indeed, he resisted joining up as long as he possibly could after his return,
partly because his family was pacifist and his father had originally fled
Lithuania to avoid being conscripted into the Russian Army. That army, with
its record of ferocious anti-Semitism, seemed an unwelcome ally in the First
World Warfor Jews who were tempted to volunteer. It was only the
impossibility of finding remunerative work that forced Rosenberg to enlist
in October 1915. It was “against all \[his\] principles of justice” to (as
he saw it) fuel the conflict: “I feel about it that more men means more war,
– besides the immorality of joining with no patriotic convictions”. Such
were the losses at the front by this time that wretchedly puny specimens
such as the five-foot-two Rosenberg were now welcomed into the army, which
had formed “Bantam” battalions specifically for undersized recruits. Even
serving alongside “a horrible rabble” he compared unfavourably with
“Falstaff’s scarecrows”, Rosenberg was deemed “completely hopeless” by a
sympathetic but exasperated officer. He felt picked on, but although he may
well have been a victim of some home-grown anti-Semitism it was his physical
incompetence, constitutional untidiness and a tendency to be thinking about
poetry rather than concentrating on drill and other military matters that
resulted in his being frequently disciplined.
Rosenberg was undoubtedly a far more sophisticated poet before he saw active
service than writers such as Sassoon or Graves; but, as in their cases, it
was the war that really made him as a writer. His time at the front was a
good deal more arduous and much less his own than that of officer poets:
sketching himself in a dugout, he was obliged to use lined scrap paper, and
the picture shows him unshaven beneath his tin helmet, crammed uncomfortably
into a tiny recess, his knees drawn up around his ears. Wilson finds it
“remarkable \[that\] despite all these hardships and his many complaints
about them, \[Rosenberg\] never lost sight of his vocation as a poet”, but
it was probably that sense of vocation which kept him going. “If poetry at
this time is of no use it certainly won’t be at any other”, he told Marsh in
June 1916, while working on “Break of Day in the Trenches”, one of the very
best poems to come out of the war.
The exact circumstances in which Isaac Rosenberg died remain unclear, and his
grave was subsequently lost. Later reports that his remains had been located
proved unfounded, and the plot beneath his headstone at the Bailleul Road
East Cemetery is empty. Much of Rosenberg’s life and work has also vanished
without trace. Paintings have passed out of known ownership and poems whose
existence is mentioned in letters or the reminiscences of his friends have
yet to surface. One officer under whom Rosenberg served admitted to throwing
away the poems he had been given: “they meant nothing to me”. Nevertheless,
in the ninety years since his death, numerous books on Rosenberg and several
editions of his work have been published, culminating in Vivien Noakes’s
immaculate edition of The Poems and Plays (OUP, 2004), in which every
variant (including the “accidental”) is represented, and every loss through
faded pencil stroke or fold and tear in a manuscript is scrupulously
indicated. Accustomed to scribbling on scraps of paper in the crammed
communality of Stepney or the trenches, Rosenberg would, one suspects, be
amused by all this careful scholarly activity, adopting perhaps the sardonic
expression he wears in the best of his self-portraits.
Papers continue to surface. As recently as 1995, a significant cache of
letters to Laurence Binyon and Gordon Bottomley, two of Rosenberg’s most
important supporters, was discovered in the British Museum, apparently left
there by Binyon when he retired from the Department of Prints and Drawings
in 1933. Gaps, however, remain. No one, for example, knows the first name of
a Japanese-British man called Mitchell who lodged with the Rosenbergs and
for a while became Isaac’s close friend. For reasons Wilson does not or
cannot explain, Mitchell’s surname is scribbled on several manuscript poems,
but little else is known about him. Wilson has, however, uncovered a
substantial amount of new material and her occasional speculations always
seem well-founded, even when inconclusive. It becomes apparent that to know
Rosenberg was not necessarily to love him, but thanks to this searching and
broadly sympathetic account, one ends up admiring him more than ever.
Jean Moorcroft Wilson
ISAAC ROSENBERG
The making of a Great War poet. A new Life
480pp. Weidenfeld and Nicolson. £25.
9780297851455
Peter Parker's The Old Lie: The Great War and the public-school ethos
has recently been reissued with a new introduction.
